


a wing in the water between the dull waves

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e14 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9643016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: Oswald fights his way back to Ed. Maybe he shouldn't.





	1. the gallows was hungry & tawdry & slow

**Author's Note:**

> Penguin/happiness is really my only OTP for this show.
> 
> This is, er, not a fic about that. Exactly.
> 
> Title is from "Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues" by Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band.

_Oswald_

He fell. Sank. It seemed as though he would fall forever, the world turning to glass ripple above him, searching, even now, for the face of his beautiful monster, the terrible, ferocious thing he had created. Icy water filled his open mouth, his nostrils, wrapped a frozen fist around his lungs and squeezed. 

His mother’s arms reached for him from the silty dark below. _Come to me, my sweet boy. The water is warm._ He could almost feel the tips of her fingers brush up against the back of his neck, but he didn’t dare turn, lest he see her, grey and bloated in death with the skin peeling from her beloved face. He had seen enough corpses to know what waited for him beneath and still, he had to fight the desperate urge to join her.

Above him, Ed was nowhere to be seen. Had he walked away? It was one thing to die for love ( _a noble thing,_ he heard the voice of his father say, with the authority of one who _knew_ ); quite another to have that sacrifice go unacknowledged. Suspended beneath the frosting river, he began to thrash, to fight. Even as the darkness closed in, he wanted to live. 

There were arms around him, lean and strong, and he let himself believe, oh so foolishly, that it was Ed rescuing him, Ed had changed his mind, had forgiven him, had decided that the bullet in his gut was a fair exchange for the knife Oswald had driven through Ed’s heart. And with that forgiveness came love, or at least the possibility of it. He imagined, in those last seconds before he blacked out, Ed dragging him from the water, bringing him home, as he had when they had first met, the intimacies of nursing him back to health made all the more intense by how they’d grown together, bent each other close to breaking.

It was worth the pain, Oswald though, worth dying even, if it meant Ed’s touch again.

 _That boy is no good for you._ Gertrud, drowning in seaweed. _Better you should find someone who appreciates you. Kutyaból nem lesz szalonna*._

The cold air hit him as he surfaced; he gasped and coughed with the shock. Whimpered Ed’s name, but all that came out was blood.

His rescuer’s laugh was soft and bitter and not, his fading consciousness realized, one that belonged to Ed.

“Hell, umbrella boy,” Fish Mooney said. “Someone’s fucked you up but good.”

 

* * *

 

_Fish_

She didn’t think he’d live, but with Strange present, the distinction was mostly academic. Between them, they managed to drag Oswald to Strange’s makeshift laboratory in, of all things, what had been a seafood processing plant before the economy had gone to shit. Fish tried not to dwell too hard on the irony. Now, the place was beneath notice; here, the odd pair had bided their time since their escape from Gotham, Strange working around the clock to cure her, Fish plotting her inevitable grueling climb back up the ladder of the criminal underworld.

At present, the repurposed interior was dominated by the small, huddled figure on the table, ruined suit dripping pale pink into the rough wood floor. Fish’s fine new dress was soaked through with river filth and Oswald’s blood, her cape wrapped around him to keep him warm. Strange raised an eyebrow at her, asked, “Are you genuinely sure about this?”

She shrugged. “We keep owing each other. Seems a shame to stop now.”

Oswald shivered and coughed again. He smelled like death; the infection would probably kill him if the gunshot wound didn’t. She wondered if she should snap his neck and let Strange resurrect him, but the doctor seemed to have decided that it wasn’t a hopeless case and got on with examining him, cutting away his ragged clothes. 

She could, of course, let him bleed out and die permanently. She had no guarantee that he’d do differently in her place, but he’d spared her, hadn’t he, that last time? They were even, but a favour from the Penguin, even a broken, out-of-power Penguin, wasn’t worth nothing in this town. He was, it had to be said, a resilient little bastard with a penchant for coming out on top. 

And she needed a favour, oh so very badly. One that she suspected he might have been in a position to grant, if he made it.

So she told Strange to do his thing, sat back and watched as lead was carefully extracted, tissue and muscle and skin sewn shut, lost blood replaced with fuck-knows-what. At the end of it he looked a little cleaner, but by no means better, paler even than usual, black hair in wet clumps over waxy skin, and as still as death on a metal laboratory table that would not seem out of place in a morgue. Despite everything he’d done and everything he was, her own scar, old enough to be near forgotten, ached with pity for him.

“Will he live?” she asked.

“If he doesn’t,” Strange rumbled, “there are always other options.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * You can’t make bacon out of a dog.


	2. there's ones that are shattered while others get saved

Oswald lived.

He came back to life with a sound more hideous than any she’d heard outside of Indian Hill, a throttled scream that snapped her to instant alertness. Fish ran to his side to find him curled with his arms wrapped around his belly, sobbing in agony. His eyes, pale and blasted, did not at first seem to recognize her, and she wondered if he _did_ die while she had drifted off, if the creature before her was not one of Strange’s mindless, empty vessels. 

Finally, his cracked lips moved in semblance of words. She thought she heard him call for his mother, and she knew for sure it was him in there and not some zombie waiting to have Strange give it a personality and a mission.

“Ed,” he whispered. “Need to find Ed.”

“Nygma,” Strange filled in, though he hardly needed to. The maniac terrorizing the city had been the top story playing on repeat for the last few hours on the radio Strange kept on the shelf amid myriad beakers and vials. Fish vaguely remembered him from somewhere, though why Oswald was so hell-bent on finding him escaped her entirely. “They’re friends.” 

Oswald heard that. His face pinched inward; it was as if his whole being had deflated. They were then, Fish surmised, the sort of friends who shot each other and then went on bombing rampages across Gotham, not that such fallings-out were unusual in her circle. Poor Oswald; he had never lacked for enemies, but he must have pissed off this Nygma guy something fierce to earn such a slow, tortuous death.

 “You can get your revenge when you’re back on your feet again,” she promised him. “In the meantime, rest.”

He stared at her, luminous and desolate. “Not revenge,” he mumbled, “love.” And, to Fish’s abject horror, started to cry.

“For. Fuck’s. Sake.” But she wrapped her arms around him anyway, felt his nose press into her shoulder. For a time, it seemed to quiet him. And Fish—well, she didn’t gloat to see him suffer. A queen accepts the vanquishing of her foes with dignity, and besides, with both of them having fallen so far from grace, he was barely even that much anymore. So much of her was consumed with rage, with hate, that she could hardly spare any for such a pitiful wretch. He trembled, then stiffened, his head snapping sideways to glare at Strange. 

“Can’t a man cry in the arms of his mortal enemy in peace?”

“Your mortal enemy dragged you out of the river,” Fish said archly, “and your _friend_ shot you in the gut and dropped you off a pier. You might want to reevaluate your relationships.”

Oswald twisted away from her to lie on his side, burying his face in his arm. She watched the sharp points of his shoulder blades rise and fall in erratic rhythm with his breathing. He was hurting, his pride as much as his body, but even at his lowest, he could manage a certain brittle defiance.

She wondered, offhandedly, whether Nygma was worthy of her stubborn little umbrella boy. Given Oswald’s obvious misery, it probably didn’t make a difference either way. He was a slave to his feelings, and a coldhearted bastard like Nygma was inevitably going to eat him for breakfast.

“Hey,” Fish said. “You want me to have him killed?”

Oswald’s voice, so faint and small: “You’d really do that?”

“It’s no problem.” 

He was still sniffling, but she thought she heard a soft chuckle. “The worst thing is,” he said, “it wouldn’t even _help._ I’d just _miss_ him.”

Was Strange rolling his eyes at her? “I might have pronounced you sane too soon,” he said, without the hint of a smile.

 

* * *

 

The second night, if such a thing were possible, was worse than the first one. Oswald screamed himself hoarse, and even a massive dose of morphine only left him moaning on the table, begging them to make the pain stop. Fish relented and got up from the cot where she slept— _God,_ how she missed having a bed—to carefully, awkwardly, as if it were booby-trapped, pet his hair. If he objected at all, he was too weak to resist.

The morphine wouldn’t be enough; out of instinct, she touched a palm to her own scar. “Strange, can’t you—” 

Strange looked over from his workbench. He didn’t sleep so far as Fish could tell, just worked day and night on something she sorely hoped would save her life and not, say, turn Gotham’s water supply into hallucinogenic soup or give the president tiny mutant T-Rex hands. 

“Certainly,” Strange said, turning his attention back to the test tubes. “If you want him in a coma.”

Fish huffed. She needed to be back in Gotham, flanked by her people, the city at her knees. Not hiding out like a rat with a mad scientist and a half-dead gangster. They were all so _pathetic_. 

“C’mere,” she said. She slid an arm under Oswald, lifted. He was heavier than he looked, but she managed to get him sitting, wincing, and helped him down from the table and over to her cot. The very effort had him whimpering again, curled up on her lap with her filthy homeless-shelter blanket draped over him, his skin fever-hot to the touch. 

“Please.” He didn’t have the slightest conception of what he was asking for, couldn’t have. In his twisted, pain-addled little brain, he might have been pleading for morphine, for death, but she could give him better than that. “Please, Fish.”

“Don’t even think about it.” Strange said from the workbench.

Oswald hissed through his teeth. He clawed at the blanket, white-knuckled and shaking. One of them must have finally done something interesting enough to warrant Strange’s interest, though it was the callous fascination of a scientist observing a lab rat pick its way between electric shocks. He _tsked,_ but he was watching carefully, keeping his distance.

She could die. She would definitely suffer, and for what? A few moments of peace for a power-mad, sociopathic ex-henchman who’d proven himself weak enough to let his plundered empire fall to ruin out of an utter inability to keep it in his pants. (And who would have thought? Her little Oswald, in doomed, hopeless love?) 

But he was _hers._ In her ramshackle castle by the river with its rotting floorboards and briny reek, her barely-tamed madman and her fickle, tortured associates, Oswald was the only thing in the world that had ever truly belonged to her.

Her fingers brushed over Oswald’s cheek, pulsing with power. She bent down, whispered in his ear, and he stopped moving, gazed up at her in wonderment. She had a moment to feel smug at the strength she still had within her before agony cracked through her like an axe striking dry wood, and she doubled over, the air knocked out of her.

“Fish?” 

Now he was the one bent around her, his hands on her shoulders. His very touch hurt, every nerve ending in her body was burning, but she managed to choke out, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“That was very foolish,” Strange said, dropping to his knees in front of her. He gripped her chin and tilted her head to one side, tracked the movements of her eyes. “It will only get worse, you know.”

“It wouldn’t get worse,” Fish growled, “if you would _fix_ me.”

“Fix you?” Oswald turned to Strange. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s dying.” Strange got on her nerves from time to time; being cooped up with anyone would, and besides the small matter of her continued survival, she had little in common with the man. Still, she admired his candor. Throughout their months holed up together, he hadn’t sugarcoated her chances. Maybe it would be different if he still had access to Indian Hill, his equipment, his blood samples ( _Alice Tetch,_ she’d heard—and heard it more than once). But here, he could alleviate her symptoms, he could reduce her temptation to use her power, but his clever mind and his looted supplies hadn’t saved her yet. “You’re not helping.” 

Fish made up her mind to ignore him. It wasn’t like she hadn’t died before; one couldn’t fear death having defeated it once. For now, she was alive, and her head ached, her limbs felt impossibly leaden, her muscles stretched and threadbare. If it weren’t for Oswald, taking up most of the narrow cot and leaning on her too heavily for her to move, she’d have collapsed into the mattress and passed out. “How’s the pain? You look better.” 

He stared down at the wide swath of gauze over his torso, as if suddenly made aware of the injury. “Oh. No. It just—doesn’t matter.” He sounded distracted. She hadn’t spent much extended time with anyone she controlled; she had no idea how long the effects would last, how much of her remaining life she had given to help him. “Fish,” he whispered. He reached for her hand. She was tired, so very tired, but she thought maybe he wanted to be under her power. He had loved her, once. Maybe it had been easier for him then. Fish, of all people, knew how lonely it was to rule the city.

“I know,” she said wearily. “I know. You’re welcome.”


	3. their glory's only vapours

_Oswald_

They settled into a routine. It was funny, what a person could get used to, like the constant ache in a mangled limb, how he sought even the cruelest steady companion when all else had abandoned him.

Mostly, he slept. He expected, each time, to wake back in the mansion, in a tangle of soft sheets and pillows. Instead, he drifted in and out of consciousness, jerking awake on a dusty wood floor with sweat dripping from his face and a hot poker through his stomach.

On bad nights, he wept loudly enough to disturb Fish and Strange. He saw them looming over him in the darkness, and through the fever haze, thought, _how odd my mother and father have become._

“I can’t stay here,” Fish said. “This is a cage. I have people counting on me.” No one answered her.

If Strange objected to his own exile, he said nothing. Oswald suspected it was all the same to him, so long as his mysterious work continued.

Oswald, too, was a captive, his tormented body a far more constricting prison than the processing plant. He could do little but plan. The radio was a constant reminder that outside, time moved on. Ed had still eluded capture, leaving cryptic clues to explosive packages across the city, Ed, who’d left a body count in the double digits, whose crimes now might very well exceed his own. Public Enemy Number One, and a ghost even with the GCPD bearing down on him, with his green spray paint and a pattern only his own genius mind could discern. They wouldn’t catch Ed, couldn’t, not now that he’d cast away his fetters and emerged, pure and savage and truly _himself._  

Oswald hadn’t needed to kill Isabella after all. That meek, docile librarian could have never held Ed’s heart, not for long. Ed ( _who had played old records for him, who had sung Gertrud’s songs, who had boasted so proudly of his three murders as if there was a soul in this cursed city without blood on his hands_ ) had always been meant for this.

Ed was an artist, and Gotham was his canvas, his bloody tribute to his lost love. Oswald wondered if he was happy now, in his own way.

Oswald himself faded from the news quickly; a mention now and then that the Mayor was missing, and nothing more. The city was burning, and in a time of crisis, Gotham didn’t need politicians. It needed heroes, and there were more than enough willing to step up.

Once, Selina Kyle came to call on Fish, climbing through a broken window on the second floor, swaying graceful over the squares of light and shadow cast by the crossbeams. Her round eyes huge in her heart-shaped face, she gaped at him: “Is that—”

“Yeah,” Fish said. “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”

“Gordon’s been looking everywhere for him.”

“Especially don’t tell Gordon. The samples?” And Selina was shaking her head, Fish staggering as if she’d been shot. The rest of their conversation was whispers, with heads bowed, and Oswald couldn’t hear it. But afterwards, when Selina had left and Strange was asleep and Oswald lay awake but still, with only his pain for company, Fish stumbled outside and screamed into the lashing wind. 

They lived on scraps, week-old bread and hard meat, a far cry from Olga’s sumptuous feasts. He became accustomed to that too, the sharp stab in his belly at every painful swallow, the sulfur aftertaste of the water he forced himself to choke down. It was right to end like this, he though, all three of them in this forgotten building. They hadn’t been fast enough, vicious enough, and now they were a pale parody of a family, still breathing and eating as though they were actually alive.

When he could walk—barely, he had lost his cane to the water, and his wound protested each step—he limped down to the river’s edge and stood on the rocky bank, the hulking, shambling skyline, wreathed in smoke, creeping over the far side. He felt a wave of strange affection for his city, held hostage by a madman, now as broken as he was.

_Oh, Ed. We could have ruled it together, side by side._  At this, a fist gripped his heart and squeezed and tore.

He felt Fish’s presence behind him. “Why did you save me?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you let me drown?”

She stood in front of him. She wore castoffs now, but was no less fierce or beautiful for all that her clothes were rags. Fish stared down at him with her mismatched eyes, her hands balled at her hips, then quick as a cat, slapped him hard across the face. The blow knocked him sprawling, his bad leg buckling underneath him, and he fell to his knees in her shadow.

“You stupid boy,” she said. “He didn’t earn the _right_ to kill you. Only _I_ decide when you die.” 

“Kill me then,” he challenged. “Do it.”

She hit him again. “Get your shit together, Cobblepot. Self-pity doesn’t become you. I _made_ you, and I made you _better than this._ ”

He buried his stinging face in his hands. “What do you want?”

He heard the rustle of threadbare fabric as she squatted down to be at his level. “I am going to rule Gotham again,” she said. “I am going to send those pretenders scurrying back under the floorboards, sleeping with one eye open in fear at the very _whisper_ of the name Fish Mooney. And you could be at my side. But I can’t do it in my current state. I need a cure.”

“I believe you are massively overestimating my capabilities.”

“Hardly,” Fish said. “I need Alice Tetch’s blood, and you’re going to get it for me.”

He couldn’t help it; he laughed, even as the movement drove shockwaves of pain through his gut. “You should have come to the Founders Dinner with me. You could have had all the blood you wanted, and I could certainly have used a plus one.”

“I need the pure stuff,” she replied. “Undiluted, so Strange can work with it. A small amount remains in the GCPD medical facility.”

“Can’t Selina break in for you?”

“She tried. They have it under heavy guard. But with _your_ access.”

Across the river, fires dotted the black silhouette of the city. “I’m not Mayor anymore.”

“That’s the most curious thing,” Fish said. “Apparently, you still are.”

Of course. Who would they have replaced him with? Half his staff was dead or had turned to Ed, or Barbara and Tabitha, and in the grips of a crime wave, there was no one capable of organizing a new election. How long had Mayor James managed to govern with his head in a box? And James hadn’t even been a _good_ mayor; a presumed-dead Oswald, who at least commanded some fear even now, could certainly manage a week or two of absence.

“If you let me go,” Oswald said carefully, “whatever makes you think I’d help you?”

She pulled his hand away and stroked his cheek, a gentle reminder that she could very easily _make_ him help her. But instead he nodded. He owed her his life, and they could battle for control for the city later, when their mutual enemies ( _Ed, she would go after Ed, she would have to_ ) were rotting beneath the surface of the harbor.

They both took the cot that night, pressed together like lovers, each with every intention of turning on the other when the time was right. In the morning he was gone, listing towards the distant city lights.

 

* * *

 

He made it to the city limits under her power. With each ungainly step away from her, Fish’s hold on him ebbed, until he could no longer ignore the pain in his leg and stomach. There was a payphone, an oasis in the desert, and he dragged himself towards it, tears burning his eyes. 

He had no money. He gambled what little strength he had left on a collect call. That someone would pick up on the other end, that when the car rolled up to where he sprawled, collapsed by the base of the payphone, that it would be help that arrived and not a bullet between his eyes.

He saw the door open, the shiny black buckled boots. 

“Hello, Victor,” Oswald said, and fainted.


	4. we're each and all this fallen

_Victor_

 

“You look like shit, boss.”

Oswald, slumped on his living room couch, managed a half-hearted sneer. “You’ve looked better yourself.”

Victor stared down at his attire—faded black jeans and an oversized hoodie. Not his most stylish ensemble, to be fair, but he hadn’t been expecting company, and it was still better than the blood splattered, slashed-to-ribbons shirt that Oswald had on over his bandages. “It’s my day off.” 

“Is that why you didn’t shoot me?”

“No one is paying me to shoot you,” Victor said. “Everyone thinks you’re already dead. I’m not doing it for free.”

“I appreciate that.”

Victor didn’t think he was being sarcastic, either. He highly doubted that the Penguin had many friends left. He’d put his life in Victor’s hands, which meant that he was desperate.

Desperate, Victor decided, but not stupid. With Falcone out of the picture, Barbara and Tabitha biding their time, and Nygma much more of a hands-on kind of guy, Victor wasn’t exactly drowning in work. He needed a gang war, not a terrorist campaign, and at least Oswald’s schemes tended to result in a reliable stream of income, if substantially more interpersonal drama that he’d ever had with Falcone. Victor had good reason to prefer him alive and on top, and Oswald knew it. 

He ran a hand over his bald skull. “I’ll get you some clean clothes,” he sighed. “You can use my bathroom if you want.”

 

* * *

 

The walls in Victor’s apartment were paper-thin, so he could hear every small noise of pain from behind the bathroom door. He sincerely hoped Oswald wasn’t planning on expiring in his tub. He stood by the window and watched a kid with a Molotov cocktail dash down the alleyway below, shrieking, before drawing down the Venetian blinds. He relished flamboyant violence as much as the next leather-clad professional killer, but even he could see that this city was going to hell in a hand basket.

After far too long a measure of silence, he knocked on the door before cracking it open. He’d been hoping to save them both the embarrassment, but there was nothing to be done for it. Oswald looked like he’d made some attempt to crawl out of the tub; he was draped over the edge, one thin arm dripping soapy bathwater onto the floor. His face, tilted up to meet Victor’s, bore an expression of unadulterated misery. 

Well, fuck. Victor had never had to fish Carmine Falcone out of a bathtub, but so it goes.

Victor managed to get a grip around his armpits and hoist him up to where he was almost standing. Oswald bent against him, his twisted leg too weak to support his own weight. 

“Easy, boss,” Victor said. “Move your leg up, that’s right.” Oswald scrambled up and out, wheezing out ragged breaths, his arms around Victor’s neck for support, sopping wet and clinging to him. Victor quickly grabbed a towel and spared himself the sight of too much of his naked employer.

“I’m sorry.” Oswald’s pale cheeks flushed. Victor sat him on the toilet and tossed a pile of undifferentiated black fabric at him. 

“You should be,” Victor said. “I was going to sleep in today. Have a beer. Maybe watch the game. Go dancing at a club that’s not Sirens.” He watched Oswald dress out of the corner of his eye. Acquiesced, with a grunt of annoyance, to letting the man grip his shoulder for support while he tugged up his pants. “I’m billing you for this, by the way.”

Oswald clutched the edge of the sink, panting with exertion. Victor’s clothes hung awkwardly on his small, crooked body. His pale eyes were red-rimmed and Victor frowned, concerned that he might start crying again.

“You can still have a beer,” Oswald said, and Victor most decidedly did not approve of this new, humbled, battered version of him. “Please, don’t let my presence interfere with your day.”

Victor huffed and held his arm out for Oswald to take.

 

* * *

 

He got a beer out of the fridge for both of them, and, with a backward glance at his uninvited guest, heated up a plate of pasta for Oswald. They sat on the couch, and Victor felt his attention divided between the football game and his boss, shovelling spaghetti into his mouth as if he worried it would run away from him. 

He should have known Oswald was the type to eat his feelings. He’d probably get fat eventually if he wasn’t careful; though, Victor thought, taking in Oswald’s sunken cheeks and thin wrists, it might suit him, the same way he managed to pull off the limp and that nose, that weird nervous giggle. By all accounts someone, probably Victor, should have put a bullet in his brain by now, God knew he’d have to eventually. But he’d survived, somehow, honed his vulnerability to an art form. Wielded it like a weapon, used it to manipulate people, and Victor couldn’t say he was entirely immune, which was why Oswald was drinking a beer on his couch and not back in the river where he belonged. Victor wouldn’t count him out yet, and until he’d served his purpose, there was nothing to be lost by being kind to him. 

“So,” Victor said, his tone conversational. “You want me to take out Nygma?” It wasn’t hard to figure out what had gone down between them, but Oswald gaped as if he’d done a particularly impressive magic trick. “I’m professional, not _blind._ ”

“I’m flattered,” Oswald said. “You’re the second person to offer. Who knew I had so many good friends?”

It wasn’t an answer. “Someone will, if I don’t. Tabitha and Barbara are gunning for him, not to mention the GCPD, for whatever good _that_ does.”

“Really.” Oswald drew out the word, feigning disinterest. Badly.

“It’s no big deal. I’d even enjoy it.”

He thought Oswald might choke on his spaghetti. “Do you know where he is?” 

Victor shrugged. “He doesn’t exactly keep a low profile.” He glanced over at his boss. “You’re going after him, aren’t you? What makes you think it will go any better the second time?”

“I wouldn’t imagine a man like you would understand.” 

“There’s a certain ambivalence required to shoot someone and not stick around to see if he’s dead,” Victor mused. “You have that going for you, at least.”

Oswald’s small, pointed smile at this would have broken his heart, if he had one. “You really think so?”

“Or he just didn’t care enough either way. You can barely walk.”

“I’ll manage.”

Uneasily: “Boss?”

“Yes?” 

“He’s lucky if it’s _only_ the girls and Gordon after him. What he’s brought down on this city is bound to attract some…other attention.”

He watched Oswald’s face carefully. The don would be curious to know how much Oswald knew. That he went a shade paler—if such a thing were possible—told Victor that he at least knew _something._ Enough to be scared, though, Victor thought, he couldn’t possibly know enough to be as scared as he should be.

“There’s a woman,” he said shakily. “Blonde. Severe.”

And more than willing and capable, Victor knew, to turn Edward Nygma into pink mist before he was even aware of her existence. The Court of Owls probably had snipers in position already. 

Victor leaned over and patted Oswald’s arm. “Got something for you.”

It was a Bulgarian umbrella, a vintage 1960s Cold War paranoia thing of beauty, and more or less useless to Victor, who got wholesale work far more often than discreet one-offs. He’d bought it on a whim from an arms dealer who hadn’t appreciated just how rare these things were. It had sat collecting dust in his storage room for two years, and he’d almost forgotten he’d had it.

“This is going on your bill too,” Victor added.

And while it didn’t exactly lift his boss out of his current Stygian mope-fest, he could tell Oswald appreciated it as much as he did.

“I hope your little tête-à-tête goes well,” Victor said. “But if it doesn’t, shoot him in the head and make sure he’s stopped breathing before you turn your back on him. Sentimentality is not a good look on you.” 

Oswald stared at him with those wide, ice-blue eyes. He gave the umbrella a tentative whirl on Victor’s hardwood floor. No, as fragile as he seemed at the moment, it did not do well to underestimate him. He suspected Nygma would find that out the hard way, if he lived long enough.

“Nor on you, old friend,” Oswald said, and his serial killer grin made the scars on Victor’s arms itch. Such fun they could have together, if Oswald wasn’t—well, the way Oswald was. 

“Shall we find him?” Victor asked.

“If I could impose on you a little further—” Oswald stood, testing his balance. He wouldn’t make it far before collapsing, but the nice thing about firearms was that he wouldn’t necessarily need to. “—there’s just someone I need to visit first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY KIDS PULL UP YOUR CHAIRS FOR SOME VICTOR ZSASZ HEADCANON. He’s a super chill guy when he’s not on the job. Actually, as evidenced by his interactions with Jim Gordon, he’s a pretty nice guy when he’s on a job too. When he first met Oswald, the future Penguin struck him as a massive dickhole because have you met him? Then Oswald took over the club, and while everyone noticed the declining profits and empty tables, Victor noticed that Oswald shared his musical taste. It’s not as though he *likes* the guy in a sexual way–he’s 90, 80, okay maybe 70 percent straight—but look, there just aren’t that many people he could both go on a murder spree with and swap post-punk records, besides his henchwomen, who keep getting themselves killed before he can ask them what their favourite Siouxsie and the Banshees song is. So maybe they could hang out if they didn’t have to work together, or if Oswald were into dancing, which he’s clearly not. Regardless, he’s still going to set his price for killing Oswald a little higher than he typically charges for hits, which is as close to friendship as Victor ever gets.


	5. there's ones that are liars & ones that don't know

_Lee_

 

Victor Zsasz was watching her. 

He watched her most nights, had done so since the funeral. For all she knew, he was _always_ watching, and she only saw him when he allowed it, to remind her of his presence. Funny—it was, technically speaking, a nice gesture, Falcone paying his top assassin to keep her from harm in a city gone mad. She’d tried to tell Carmine it was completely unnecessary, that she wasn’t, now that Mario was gone and Jim Gordon was definitively out of her life, in any more danger than any other Gotham civilian.

Carmine had merely pointed out (especially at present, with Nygma’s Rube Goldberg death traps felling squats and opera houses alike, but also in a more general sense) that this was still a considerable amount of danger. 

So Zsasz watched her, and she pretended that she didn’t notice him there. He wouldn’t harm her—quite the opposite—but he disturbed the hell out of her, his creepy, eyebrow-less face shining like ironed polyester in the shadows.

Lee fumbled with her keys. She steeled herself; it was always hard, walking through the door, into _their_ home, knowing, as she did, that Mario would never be waiting for her on the other side. Still, walking inside would put a sturdy wall between herself and the assassin lurking in the bushes, and as long and exhausting and nightmarish as it always was, she had survived another day in Gotham City.

Her relief lasted right up until she flicked on the lights and saw Oswald Cobblepot sitting in her living room.

 

* * *

 

Lee’s heart leapt into her mouth, but it was more from the shock of someone breaking into her house than from Cobblepot himself. However many people he’d killed, he was alone and unarmed and even if Zsasz wasn’t a scream away, he didn’t even break the top five on the list of the scariest things she’d seen today. 

Even so, she edged along the wall, her eyes on the telephone on the hall table. “I heard you were dead.”

He didn’t look far from it, sheet-white and shaky. He was perched on the loveseat, legs crossed with a wide black umbrella across his lap, and while he smiled at her, polite and deferential as always, she could see the lines of strain in the corners of his mouth, the trembling in his hands. He was ill, or injured, and come to think of it, that might explain what he was doing in her house.

“Yes, well. It didn’t take.” His gaze followed her hand as it crept for the phone. “If you’re calling Jim, you needn’t bother. He’s on his way.”

She tried, and failed, to conjure a scenario that the addition of Jim Gordon wouldn’t automatically make a million times worse.

“I imagine this is very…awkward for you,” he said. “You’ll have to put your personal issues aside for the time being. We three have a common interest.”

“Please—” She sank into the chair opposite him. “Whatever you and James Gordon are up to, I want no part in it. Just…go away.” Lee closed her eyes and tilted her head against the back of the chair, now fairly certain that he wasn’t about to put a knife to her throat or a gun to her head or any number of things that seemed to happen every time her life intersected with Jim’s.

“I’m sorry about Mario,” Cobblepot blurted. Her eyes snapped back open. “Zsasz told me everything.” Was he expecting a response? “I’m trying to become a more considerate person.”

Lee couldn’t help it. She started laughing. All of the terror, the panic, the grief, bubbled up in her chest and she bent forward, hands to her knees, choking in convulsive shudders.

“Dr. Thompkins?”

She straightened, wiped tears that had somehow appeared, stared at the odd little man who was inexplicably at the root of so many problems. He was watching her with those pale, perpetually startled eyes, as if he’d had a sudden lightning bolt of inspiration.

“I had it all, you know. Everything I ever wanted. Recognition, power, money, _respect._ ” His lips curled around those last two syllables as if they were particularly distasteful. It occurred to her that she probably _should_ be afraid of him, this gutter rat who had crawled out from obscurity, with no family name, no connections, nothing more than sheer devious blood thirst, to become both officially and unofficially the most powerful man in the city—even if he’d only been able to hang on to his crown a short while. “But it didn’t matter.”

“What happened?”

“I fell in love.” His voice held an edge of hysteria. She was reminded that, as low an opinion as she held of Hugo Strange’s diagnostic methods and treatment protocols, Oswald Cobblepot had been, and perhaps remained, a certified lunatic. “And so I lost it all, as one does.” He reached out a hand and placed it over hers. “You would never have been happy with Mario, Dr. Thompkins. You might have been content. Comfortable. But you would have never been happy.”

“I was,” she whispered. The words were a cardboard shield in a thunderstorm. “I could have been.” 

“But what can you do?” he said. “My mother always said, Oswald, you have to follow your heart. There’s someone special out there for you—well, she never told me what to do if they didn’t feel the same way.” He coughed, wrapped one arm around his midsection. Her medical instinct overriding her fear, she dropped to her knees beside him and placed a hand on his forehead. His skin was waxy and feverish under her palm.

“Is it pointless to ask who did this to you?”

“Yes.”

“Mayor Cobblepot,” she said, then, softer, “Oswald.”

He flinched, but let her unfasten the strange contraptions on his shirt—was he wearing Victor Zsasz’s clothes?—to reveal swathes of rust-stained bandages taped over his abdomen. It wasn’t the only injury; there were old knife scars, the shiny circle of a bullet wound on his shoulder, the trophies of a lifetime of being stabbed, beaten, and shot at. The latest wound seemed at least to have been treated by someone who knew what they were doing, but whoever had stitched him up clearly hadn’t been responsible enough to stop him from running around the city afterwards. Her training conjured up a variety of scenarios—infection, sepsis—and whatever he had done in the past, she couldn’t leave him to that.

“You need to be in a hospital.”

“And I will be, Doctor” he said. “As soon as this is over.”

She moved quickly, automatically. Gauze, scissors, rubbing alcohol. She’d taken to keeping a fully stocked medicine cabinet ever since meeting Jim Gordon. Lee was a psychiatrist and a medical examiner, not a surgeon, but between her half-remembered rotation at a trauma unit and the endless parade of torture the city inflicted on its victims, she’d gotten more adept than she’d ever planned at patching up injuries that otherwise would have been better left to her late husband. 

Cobblepot bore her ministrations as stoically as possible, but when she looked up at his face, it was wet with tears. “When’s the last time you had any pain medication?” He gave a little headshake at that. God, how was he even still alive? “Okay. Shit. Stay still. You’re doing great.”

“I am?”

Lee rummaged through her medicine cabinet for something stronger than an aspirin, and came up blank. Should she just get him drunk? No, that was a bad idea, he’d been unbelievably lucky with the bullet’s trajectory but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be compromised liver or kidney function, and _how_ exactly had he become her responsibility? Better to take the edge off as best she could, wait for Jim to get here…

_Jim._

“Oswald?”

“Yes?”

She shook out a few pills into his hand and gave him a glass of water. “When did you call James Gordon?” 

“About an hour ago, why?”

He’d still been at the GCPD when she’d left—out the back entrance, to avoid running into him—and she didn’t live far from work. As bad as things were between them, a phone call from Oswald Cobblepot saying that he was at Lee’s house would have sent Jim busting down the door, gun drawn like a Wild West cowboy. If he wasn’t here, now, it was because he couldn’t be.

She walked over to the television and switched it on. There was Valerie Vale, microphone in hand, several blocks away from a familiar row of smoldering buildings.

”— _the note, believed to be from the elusive terrorist known as the Riddler, read:_ You dread my approach but without me, all is chaos. What am I? _This ominous question was answered only minutes later when an unknown gas flooded through the GCPD headquarters. Emergency personnel found the doors locked from the inside and are attempting to—_ ”

Lee whirled, furious. “ _You_ did this. _You_ let that monster out of Arkham. If Jim—if _anyone_ dies in there, it’s all on you.”

“Ah,” Cobblepot said. “So you _do_ still care about him.”

“I don’t see what—” 

“Nothing is more destructive than love, Dr. Thompkins. And we both have unfortunate taste in that regard. Help me stand.” She did, without thinking about it; he winced and nearly fell into her, but managed to right his balance with the stupidly large umbrella. “The deal is this. I stop him—Ed Nygma, that is—and Jim and his colleagues go free and unharmed. In exchange, one vial of Alice Tetch’s blood, which I know you have access to. You can give it to Zsasz if I don’t make it out. I’m sure you won’t have any difficulty finding him.”

She thought she couldn’t be any angrier. But. Mario was a raw wound that kept re-opening at every turn, and it was not for nothing that people keep shooting Cobblepot. “Hasn’t the virus caused enough problems? Now you’re going to, what? Spread it all over Gotham?”

“It’s payment for a debt.” He swayed on his feet, and she was almost, _almost_ impressed at his grim determination. “You would be saving a life, not taking one. Can you do that, Dr. Thompkins? I’m begging you, trust me, just this once?”

“I wouldn’t trust you if my life depended on it.”

“Your life doesn’t,” Cobblepot said. “But Jim’s does.” 

She faced him, stared down into his fever-mad eyes as if she could discern truth or sanity or anything at all from just looking at him. For years, she had cleaned up the destruction left by men like him, the screaming, straightjacketed lunatics in Arkham, the corpses of the bizarre dead and the ones that didn’t stay dead, tried to keep hope alive when nearly everyone around her had given up Gotham to its fate. She had tried to love Jim, and then to forget him, and even now, she would do anything to save him.

“Nygma’s been holding the entire city hostage for days,” Lee said. “He has the GCPD boobytrapped and every cop inside a prisoner. What, exactly, do you think you’re going to do?” 

She felt foolish the second the words left her mouth; Cobblepot might look helpless, he might have crawled to her rather than go to a hospital like a normal person, but he still had an army of mobsters at his disposal. Though maybe he didn’t, and besides, hadn’t Nygma been at the head of that army? The underworld seemed in as much chaos as Gotham’s civil society, and the guns blazing approach hadn’t exactly worked for the GCPD.

“I’m going to talk to him,” Cobblepot said.

“You’re going to—” 

“I told you. We both—” He giggled, high-pitched and manic. “—have the most unfortunate taste. Alice Tetch’s blood, and in return, I can guarantee Jim Gordon’s safety. He _is_ my friend too, you know, for much longer than he’s been yours.” 

“He’s not my friend,” Lee said.

“No,” Oswald said. “I suppose you’ll never be _friends._ ”

Exhausted to the core of her being and left to puzzle out whatever he meant by _that,_ she reached for her coat. After a moment of hesitation, she grabbed another coat (black, with a ridiculous feathered collar) so that he wouldn’t freeze to death on his way to getting himself killed.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m guessing you want a ride, too.”


	6. i will not be buried in my mother's grave

_Oswald_

 

It was raining as they drove, thick slashes beating down on the windshield, a funhouse distortion that turned streetlights into twisted fingers and leering faces. Oswald huddled into Lee’s coat, the feathers tickling his nose, and tried to keep from hyperventilating.

Even with the coat, he was chilled to the bone, wondered—blood pounding in his ears, in time with the throb of his wound—whether he was already dead, whether these past few days had been anything other than a series of desperate last firings of neurons in a brain struggling for oxygen beneath the water’s surface. Either way, it was going to end the same, with him wet and cold and miserable, facing down the only person in the world he loved. 

If Ed even lived long enough for Oswald to confront him. He saw movement in the shadows as Lee circled the block around the precinct, someone running over rooftops. They didn’t move like police snipers, or like any assassin he’d seen besides maybe Zsasz.

Ed had attracted attention, Zsasz had said. He remembered coming home, ready to tell Ed about his strange encounter with the woman at the Founders Dinner, and Ed, well—there was no use dwelling on why Ed had been preoccupied _now._ He just had to hurry.

Ed was a genius with remote controls; he could be halfway across the city and still in control of the carnage, but Oswald didn’t think so. He’d want to be close. He would want to watch. He was dismantling Gotham piece by piece, and while most of it had to be about destroying Oswald’s legacy, about breaking his promise to keep the city safe, the GCPD was different. He’d worked there, fallen in love there, murdered two cops and a file clerk, made enemies of Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock. If he couldn’t personally strangle everyone inside, destroying the precinct would still constitute a special occasion for him. He’d need a sightline, probably a rooftop. Oswald craned his neck, strained in the hope of catching just a glimpse of the tall, thin figure holding the city by its throat.

“There,” he said. They were passing the decrepit film studio just south of the precinct. It must have been glorious once, all sinewy Art Deco lines and graceful archways, but it had since fallen to crawling ivy and disrepair. Most importantly, though, it was tall enough that someone standing on the roof could see each entrance into and out of the GCPD, and ornate enough that, as long as he kept moving, a sniper wouldn’t have a clear shot. 

Lee circled the block. There were fire trucks lined up down the street and a blockade around the perimeter of the building. That was bad, that was stupid, Ed would wait until there were first responders on the scene to detonate whatever explosives he’d rigged. His Edward had never done anything in half measures. 

“You’ll need to get them away from the doors,” he told Lee. “They’ll listen to you.” 

“And if they don’t?”

“Then get away yourself. You made me a promise.”

“Alice Tetch’s virus. Zsasz. I know.” She put the car into park and turned to face him, his unwilling and very temporary ally. “Just keep Jim safe, will you?” 

He didn’t tell her that—as fond as he was of Jim Gordon and as much as he’d certainly mourn his death if it came to that—her ex wasn’t his first priority. Still: “You should tell him. Before it’s too late.”

She opened and closed her mouth a few times before saying, “That’s madness.”

“Yes. Well.” He flashed her a sheepish smile, then flung open the door. “Love makes madmen of us all”

 

* * *

 

The chain locking the studio’s front door had already been pried open with a crowbar. Oswald walked into the cavernous lobby, leaning on the umbrella. A wrought-iron staircase spiralled up from the ground floor. He grimaced at the sight of it, and began to climb, pulling himself forward along the railing, his bad leg a dead weight behind him.

If only his mother could see him now, bedraggled and bleeding, defeated, his kingdom in ruins. 

_But brave,_ her voice said, echoing from the vaulted ceilings. _Always so very brave._  

That would be the blood loss, he decided, if it wasn’t one of Ed’s sick games. He was not so optimistic a person that he could believe it was actually her, giving him the strength he needed to continue at the very end, waiting to welcome him home. He suspected that Ed was right, and he would be headed to a very different place.

_Such a good boy,_ Gertrud whispered. _I knew from the very beginning you were destined for greatness._  

He didn’t think that dying to save a building full of cops who wanted nothing more than to see him behind bars constituted greatness, per se. It certainly wasn’t how he’d ever intended to go out. Nor was he so selfless a person that he could take comfort in knowing that Fish Mooney would survive, that in saving her life, however indirectly, he’d at last settled the debt between them. She might very well be grateful enough for it to burn the world down in his memory. His only concern was for Ed, who had no possible way to know how close he teetered to the brink, that even in the hour of his victory, the shadowy cabal that held sway over all of Gotham was closing in on him. 

He reached the top floor. Fell to his knees, wheezing in pain. The floor of the old studio was blanketed in a layer of dust, the drag of his gait worn into a wobbling pathway dotted with droplets of blood. He touched shaking fingers to his shirt, felt a soggy patch where he’d ripped stitches open. It hurt so terribly. His vision blackened at the corners, and his head was swimming, and he wanted more than anything to lie down, and sleep, and be done with it all.

“Just a bit farther,” he murmured. He’d made it this far, hadn’t he? King of Gotham, top of the world. He looked down on the abandoned soundstage, cracked through with weeds. His breath echoed through the empty space, dissolving to join the ghosts of those who, in a different time and a different city, had once stood beneath the glittering lights. Of course Ed had chosen this place to make his last stand; his love had always had a flair for the dramatic, even more than Oswald did. 

Oswald pushed himself up against the railing and hobbled across the floor to the stairs leading to the roof. The light was long dead, and he was encased in darkness the moment the door shut behind him, fumbling for a handhold, forcing himself to keep moving. He had to reach Ed, had to warn him, had to make him understand—

What use is a love you haven’t suffered for? Without pain, how would you know that it was _real?_

Oswald crawled more than he climbed, dragged himself through the darkened passageway, one hand streaking blood along the wall. He could see at the top of the stairs the dim outline where light beaded through the gaps in the doorway. One more step, then another, and he at last reached the top and slammed the entire weight of his body into the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies if my Gotham geography is fail. The maps I managed to find made it look like the theater was close enough to see the GCPD, but I am not an expert in these things.


	7. the monsters came a'brawling

Oswald tumbled onto the roof with a crash, catching his balance on the edge of the door in just enough time that, while his knee protested sharply, he managed not to fall flat on his face. Gripping the doorknob with one hand and the umbrella handle with the other, he leaned into the cinderblock wall, chest heaving with exertion. The roof was a mishmash of architectural quirks and silver screen relics, the still-dignified ruins of a fallen civilization. A tarnished silver rocketship rose proudly at its center, built when Gotham was flush with cash and ambition and gazing into a bright and promising future. Looming over it, a giant beast, paint sloughing from his skin and rainwater dripping from his shaggy arm, scaled a replica of the Empire State Building as he reached upwards towards the radio tower that stretched into the slate grey mist.

Ed stood in the shadow of the tower, hands clasped holding the detonator behind his narrow back. He had dressed for the occasion. The sulfur halo of the expressway beneath the roof outlined the sharp angles of his suit in acid green. Oswald’s stomach gave a giddy flip-flop that had nothing to do with his gunshot wound.

The rain and the screech of sirens must have masked the noise of his entrance, because while Oswald’s days of stealthy approaches were long behind him, Ed didn’t so much as turn his head as Oswald made his halting, painful progress across the roof. For a moment, he seemed so strangely unaware that Oswald might have snatched the detonator from him and ended the whole sordid affair.

But then Ed did turn towards him, and just that acknowledgment, the twitching set of his jaw, the way the raindrops sparkled off his glasses in the flashing red-and-blue of police cars, was enough to wrench Oswald’s traitor heart into spasms.

Whatever he’d said to Lee Thompkins, Oswald had come up to the roof expecting to die. Nothing had changed in the time since Fish had pulled him out of the river to stop Ed from putting another bullet in him. In his wildest fantasies, he might have imagined Ed forgiving him, folding him into his arms, tearfully apologizing while Oswald murmured that there was nothing to be sorry for. He might have prayed that the various forces aligning against Ed’s reign of terror would choose that moment to strike at him, so that Oswald might play the hero and save his life or die at his side. He had convinced himself that nothing Ed could say or do would surprise him. Except—

“Oh,” Ed said. “It’s _you_ again.” 

Oswald laughed, high and nervous. “Me again! Surprise.” He cast a glance down at the detonator. Ed’s hands were shaking. How much pressure, even accidental, would it take to trigger it? “What’s the plan, Ed?”

“You should know. Don’t you know? You’re the one who’s taken up unwanted residence in my head.” He brought the detonator to his face, worried it between his long fingers. “I didn’t invite you in. If I had ghosts troubling my conscience, you wouldn’t be one of them. I don’t regret killing you.”

“Well, um. Good news? You actually didn’t, so.”

Ed blinked; it was as though he had been staring through Oswald the whole time, as if he were only just seeing him now. “You have a coat,” he murmured. “You always look so cold, usually.”

“Do you like it? It’s Lee’s.” Oswald had gone over every scenario, every possibility, he’d steeled himself for hatred, murderous, blind rage, but not this. Not this Ed, falling to pieces with the city at his feet, scattered and jittery like he’d been in Arkham, his attention as much on the space beside him as it was on Oswald. Hd Ed been hallucinating him, his mind so twisted up in knots that he’d appointed a presumed-dead career criminal to be the voice of his conscience? If Oswald didn’t know better, he’d have been flattered. “I’m not in your head. I’m right here. Beside you.”

Ed was close enough to touch, if he dared, if he was brave enough. He had to be. He couldn’t _not_ be. He’d come this far, so close he could feel the puffs of Ed’s breath meeting the air, could, if he only crossed the space between them, hear Ed’s heart, racing with the thrill and the terror of power, against his ear. 

How Oswald ached for him still, despite everything.

Oswald’s hand felt as heavy as Butch’s iron mitt as he lifted it, trembling, to grasp Ed’s wrist. He was bonier than Oswald remembered, and Oswald wondered if he’d been eating enough in between mental breakdowns and turning Gotham into his own personal puzzle box. “Why don’t you put that detonator down?”

‘It’s you,” Ed whispered. “You’re—real?”

“I’m real,” Oswald said. For a moment, a spark of hope. He smiled.

Ed’s dark eyes flashed in fury and before Oswald even saw him move, he lunged. Oswald probably couldn’t have dodged the blow at the best of times; Ed’s fist slammed into his stomach and he went down hard into the concrete railing, his entire body lit up in agony. 

Ed hauled him back on his feet and bent him over the railing. Sharp fingers pressed into his wound, a knife twisting in his guts like being shot all over again. Ed was on top of him, his hot breath an inferno inches from Oswald’s freezing skin, the closest they’d been since ( _had it only been days ago?_ ) they had been friends.

“I’m a bird—” Spittle, mingled with rain, splashed Oswald’s face. “—but if you throw me off a roof, my wings will not save me. What am I?”

Nothing in the world existed apart from Ed’s hands—hands he’d so longed to have touch him again— strangling his throat and pushing into his belly. He managed to choke out, “That’s not a very good riddle, Ed.”

Stars danced in front of his eyes, a blurred line of green in the corner of his vision. He couldn’t black out, not now, if he fainted he’d be dead, Ed—even if he didn’t know it—would be dead, and so he fought desperately for that last glimmer of consciousness, a small, quiet corner of his mind noticing that if both of Ed’s hands were on him, he couldn’t still be holding the detonator.

“If it takes a hundred attempts to kill you,” Ed growled, “I _will_ see you dead.”

“And I’d let you.” Oswald tried to wriggle free, loosen the unbearable pressure somehow. Ed’s weight on him was the only thing keeping his leg from collapsing under him, but if he could just get some traction… “Do you honestly think you would have stood a _chance_ against me if I didn’t allow it?” For that insolence, Ed gripped his neck tighter. 

“Because you love me.” Ed spat out the words like a poison his body was compelled to expel, and any response Oswald might have given was trapped in his throat. “Is that why you’re pathetically trying to interfere with my plans?”

There was no satisfaction, as Oswald knew very well, in declaring one’s genius and villainy to a man incapable of responding with admiration or horror, and Ed must have realized this too, because an instant later he hurled Oswald into a rotting plywood backdrop. Spluttering, Oswald tried to stand, but his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. He folded an arm into his midsection, his borrowed shirt soggy with blood, and fumbled for the umbrella that lay a few feet away.

“ _I’m_ pathetic?” he screamed, hoarse, into the wind. “You don’t want to rule the city, you don’t want _anything._ You wouldn’t know what to _do_ if you won. All of _this_ —” He gestured wildly, as if to sweep over all of Gotham’s sordid corruption, the horror and destruction Ed had left in his wake. “—just so someone would _notice_ you.” He started to laugh. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming, and he was going to die tonight after all, split open and raw and bleeding to death in the puddles of rain that had collected on the studio’s sagging roof. “Well, _someone_ noticed. I didn’t come up here to save those poor fools in the precinct _,_ Ed. 

“I came here to save _you._ ”


	8. a dagger, a crown, or a home in the snow

_Ed/ward_

 

Ed halted a few feet from where Oswald lay sprawled on the roof. His other half sidled up beside him; Ed could have felt the whisper of his mirror reflection’s suit jacket were it—were _he_ —corporeal.

 _What are you waiting for?_ the Other Edward whispered. He no longer dressed more impeccably than Ed; they were identical now, but for the glasses his hallucinatory self had never needed. They were of one mind, entirely. Mostly. _Kill him. We’ve got work to do._

Ed shushed him and turned his attention to Oswald. “Save me from Tabitha and Barbara and _Butch_? I think I can handle them on my own just fine.”

Oswald shook his head. Ed had seen dead men in better shape; come to think of it, the vision of Oswald that had haunted him, blue-skinned and wreathed in seaweed, since that day at the docks ( _he’d be bloated and half eaten by fish by now,_ whispered the Other Edward, who had seen just as many corpses as Ed had and had just as strong a compulsion to be accurate in these matters) looked healthier than the real one who cowered, pale and shivering, before him. “There’s a woman,” he said. “I tried to tell you about her, the night…you were _busy_ with Isabel—”

“Isabell _a._ ”

“ _Isabel-lah_ ,” Oswald snarled. The rage left his face as quickly as it had appeared, though whether that was from pain or guilt—no, he didn’t feel guilt, the little psychopath was constitutionally incapable of it—Ed couldn’t be sure. “She said she ran Gotham. She was…watching me.” He coughed. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, stark against the white of his face. His eyelids fluttered. “I’m told she doesn’t take well to disruption.”

It was a weak story, and Oswald clearly knew it. Sure, Ed had heard the rumours, urban legends, passed around like currency in the underworld. One couldn’t stray far from the periphery to hear about what befell most of the Whisper Gang, a warning to ambitious criminals against stepping too far out of line. But to imagine that those phantom forces posed some kind of an immediate threat to _him…_  

 _Disgusting,_ the Other Edward said, and Ed nodded in agreement.

His mirror self laughed. _I didn’t mean Penguin. At least the snivelling little monster knows what_ he _wants_.

“And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It means they’re going to _kill_ you, Ed,” Oswald bleated, and the Other Edward said, _Let’s face it, if you really wanted him dead, he’d be splattered across the expressway by now._  

“Shut _up._ ” Ed paced a line between them. _Maybe he’s right,_ the Other Edward said. _Maybe you love him after all. What_ would _Father say?_

“Come with me.” Ed’s reflection was taken aback by this offer, and stroked his chin thoughtfully with one finger. “There are tunnels under the studio left over from Prohibition. We can get out without anyone seeing.”

 _I’m just saying,_ the Other Edward said lightly. _It didn’t take you this long to kill Kristen. Speaking of which, have you ever wondered why the people you care about tend to wind up dead? The common denominator in all your failed relationships is you._

Ed ignored him. “And go where?”

“Anywhere!” Oswald’s voice cracked on the last syllable. “Out of the city, before it consumes you. Before it destroys you.”

“I’m not the one who’ll be destroyed.”

 _This is boring,_ the Other Edward said. _Kill him, hit the detonator, and keep moving. Here, I’ll help._

Without thinking, Ed moved between his hallucination and Oswald—and remembered the detonator. He must have put it down somewhere. He wasn’t normally sloppy; he’d killed dozens, sacrificed them to the great black gaping maw of his own grief, and each death had been methodically, exquisitely planned. Flawless. Leave it to goddamned Oswald Cobblepot to get in the way of a winning streak.

 _Looking for this?_ The Other Edward held the trigger, admiring its design—his own, of course, he’d stood over Ed as he worked, offering pointers. 

“Don’t do this,” Oswald pleaded.

“Since I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain,” he quoted. “Isabella loved Shakespeare, you know. You stole my last chance for happiness when you killed her.”

“I set you _free_.” The Other Edward mock-yawned theatrically. _Boring._ Ed glared at him. There were too many people in his head, crowding him out. His reflection, carefully mapping out his future, guiding him as he laid waste to the city. Kristen, with her silvery laugh and the ring of yellow-green bruises necklacing her throat. Isabella, beautiful Isabella, just a waft of perfume and a strain of melody, a sweet interlude vanishing into smoke.

And Oswald, who had been his best friend, his only friend in his entire life, who had loved him with such perfect devastation, dead at his hand and yet inexplicably clinging to life before him, begging him for mercy.

Not, Ed thought, mercy for himself. Another man would have run away from his would-be murderer, but whatever else one could say about Oswald, he wasn’t a coward. Not when it counted.

 _Not like you._ Beside him, the Other Edward traced the handle of his detonator with his thumb, and Ed could have sworn that Oswald’s eyes followed the motion, widened in horror. As if he’d _seen._

But he couldn’t have. The Other Edward wasn’t real, ergo Oswald couldn’t have seen him. Ed may have been cracking up, but he wasn’t so far gone to believe something so ludicrous. 

Ed’s reflection braced the box, ready to bring the handle down, and he saw a flash of black, the umbrella by Oswald’s side unfurl like a bat wing.

“You told me once that love was a weakness,” Oswald said. He sounded resigned. “It’s never been that for me.”

Ed saw the flash of the muzzle before the gunshot had a chance to register, a sizzle of white-hot fire through the meat of his upper arm. He whirled on Oswald, who’d been thrown backwards into the broken plywood by the weapon’s kickback, his eyes shut and thin lines of pain tugging his mouth into a grimace. 

“Did you just shoot me with an _umbrella_?”

Oswald just shrugged. Ed glanced down at his arm; the suit was a lost cause, but the wound itself was only a narrow gash. It wouldn’t be fatal, or even crippling. 

“You have a terrible aim.”

“I wasn’t aiming for you.” 

Ed turned his head to where his other half had been standing. The detonator lay on his side in an inch of water, exposed wires sparking white across the rippled surface. The GCPD would survive to be completely useless another day.

The Other Edward had vanished.

“Oswald.” Ed cautiously sidestepped the umbrella, lest it go off again, and knelt at his side. He took the other man’s pointed chin in his hand and tilted his head up. He was still breathing, shallow sips of air like a straw at the bottom of a cup. “Oswald, did you see _him_? Did you _make_ him leave?” 

“Ghosts aren’t real, Ed,” Oswald said woozily. His head drooped back down to his black feathered collar, but he reached one hand up, folded it around Ed’s where it touched his face. “I’m so tired. If you’re going to kill me, can you do it out of the rain?”

“I don’t forgive you,” Ed told him.

“I know.”

“I don’t love you, either.”

“You don’t need to.” Oswald gave him a strained smile. “Not yet.” He clutched Ed’s arm to pull himself up, then fell back with a quiet _oof_. “A proper gentleman would carry me.” 

Ed sighed heavily and picked him up, no easy task with his wounded arm and the drenched winter coat adding to his weight. Oswald leaned his head into Ed’s shoulder and made a contented little noise, as if that was all he’d ever wanted in the first place. Ed looked down at him, his eyelashes dark and thick over his cheekbones, the dusting of freckles across his long nose. So vulnerable, Ed thought, and so oddly peaceful. 

It wasn’t unpleasant to hold him like this, Ed thought. They’d been friends once. Whatever blood had spilled between them, he wouldn’t be the man he was without Oswald, and each of them now had killed the woman Ed loved. He could always change his mind and kill him in the morning, if either of them lived that long. 

He clutched Oswald tightly, and left his ghosts, silent for now, to the rainy rooftop and the night.


	9. no homeland for the gentle-hearted

_Oswald_

 

He remembered next to nothing of the drive out of Gotham. Ed must have stolen a car—he couldn’t have carried Oswald for very far without being seen—but of course, he had always been so very resourceful. The climb down the stairs at the film studio, the dank mildew reek of the old tunnels, maybe a block or two to the car, hours along the expressway, all would have afforded him plenty of opportunity to end his life, but Ed hadn’t. Oswald woke in a motel room, with a long stretch of merciful blackness his only memento of their escape. 

That wasn’t exactly true. He remembered being held, Ed touching his face, and the smell of him, old books and kerosene. He remembered feeling safe enough in the arms of the man who’d nearly killed him that he’d finally passed out. Ed must have, at some point, taken his shoes off, tucked the sheets around his shoulders, and he wished he’d been awake for that much of it at least.

Ed sat, ramrod straight, by the window, the last grainy dregs of dusk slashing purple and black across his face through the slats of the venetian blinds, his expression carefully schooled to inscrutability. He was wearing a bloodstained undershirt, his ruined shirt and jacket slung over the back of the chair, the angry red gash down his bicep exposed. Oswald had no idea how long he’d been there. They hadn’t spoken in Oswald’s brief flashes of lucidity between fever dreams. Not even when he’d cut away Oswald’s shirt to clean and re-stitch his wound. He’d been efficient rather than gentle, ignoring his helpless patient’s whimpers, but after, his hand had lingered on Oswald’s bare hip for longer than it needed to. 

Oswald told himself that it was enough, for now, and probably more than he deserved. Still, they couldn’t co-exist in stony silence forever. He cleared his throat.

Ed turned to look at him, and he might have withered and died beneath the heat of that glare. Oswald immediately regretted drawing Ed’s attention. He could have just watched Ed for longer, left the small issue of their mutual betrayals to linger, ignored.

“You’ll live,” Ed said, his voice a rusted hinge. Oswald couldn’t tell if he was happy about it or not, or whether he was simply pleased that his seldom-used medical expertise hadn’t let him down when at last called upon.

“Okay,” Oswald said. “Good?” He made the mistake of trying to sit up. Pain lanced through his core and it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise at this point, but he still bit back a scream, dug his nails into the wood of the headboard, and buried his face in the pillow.

He heard a rustling from the chair. Felt cold fingers on his hairline. Didn’t connect the two until he _did,_ and it would be so easy for Ed to just snap his neck, bury him somewhere out here in the middle of nowhere where no one would ever find his corpse, where there would be no Fish Mooney, no Hugo Strange, to drag him kicking and screaming back into the world of the living.

“Don’t move,” Ed told him, low and dangerous. His fingers moved decisively, but not brutally, into the pulse point below Oswald’s jaw, Ed’s own breath held, careful, as he measured, and once Oswald realized what it was that Ed was doing he wanted nothing more than to push himself into the other man’s touch. It was vital that he kept still, and he stiffened, tried to slow down his heartbeat even as it raced, anything to avoid reminding Ed that he wanted him badly enough to kill and die for him. Ed bent close to him and murmured, “I may only be given but never bought. Sinners seek me but saints do not.”

Oswald groaned and rolled onto his back. “Can we not do riddles now? I’m…look, everything _hurts_ and I’m exhausted.”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, he knew he’d said the wrong thing—he needed to be _understanding,_ to show Ed that he had genuinely repented, transformed into someone worthy of love, or at the very least worthy of not being slowly and excruciatingly murdered—but Ed just removed his glasses, polished the lenses with the hem of his undershirt, and set them aside on the nightstand. His eyes were dark and blazing and Oswald, knowing full well what Ed was capable of doing to him, shivered.

And then Ed’s mouth was on his, soft against Oswald’s dry, chapped lips, his hands tugging through Oswald’s hair. He was aware, dimly, of the ever-present ache in his gut and leg, but it seemed unimportant, abstract, compared with how every inch of his skin came suddenly alive, humming, vibrating under Ed’s touch.

He was overcome with want, even through the pain. He was sweaty, and Ed hadn’t shaved in a day or two, and neither had brushed their teeth, and it was _perfect._ Ed cradled his face, ran an exploratory thumb over his cheek up to his temple, and Oswald shivered and moaned and twisted up to get closer to him.

“Is this what you wanted?” Ed rasped into his mouth. “Is this what you killed her for?”

 _I’m sorry,_ he tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come, every lie he spoke would be stolen from time he could be spending kissing Ed. But it was Ed who pulled away first, touched a curious finger to his mouth, as if it, and not his heart, was guilty of betraying his dead love to her murderer.

“That wasn’t…distasteful,” Ed mused. “I thought, somehow, that it might be.”

“Ah,” Oswald said. “And here we see demonstrated the effortless charm that makes women and men alike swoon at your feet.” He made a grab for Ed’s hand, but Ed had gone stiff and cold again, reminded of what Oswald was.

“You did,” he said, absently. “Swoon, that is.”

“You shot me. I was bleeding to death.”

“You shot me too.”

 _I shot at your hallucination, who was about to torch a building full of cops and draw the ire of a dangerous council of scary rich psychopaths,_ Oswald almost said, and thought better of it. Some things were better left unexplained.

“Does that mean we’re even? I want us to be even, Ed.” He pushed himself up against the headboard, heat prickling his eyes at the effort. “I want things to be like they were before.”

“Oswald,” Ed said, and he sounded almost wistful. “They can’t ever be.” He backed away—he couldn’t be still, not for long, there was too much fire and madness for his own skin to contain—and Oswald’s face burned where Ed had cupped his cheek. “But it’s not as much fun without you. I have to invent people, and they’re never as interesting.” 

“I’m building an army,” Oswald offered, the way a very different sort of man might suggest a second, less humiliatingly awkward date. “Well, Fish Mooney is building an army, but it’ll inevitably belong to me when she, uh, let’s say has no use for it anymore. Which is to say that you could blow up a police station, Ed, or you could _own_ the police station.” 

It didn’t do well to hope; he’d had enough loss and disappointment and pain in his brief life to know that. But Ed was listening, at least.

“ _We_ could,” Oswald added.

“That’s what you want?” Ed asked.

“I want _you,_ ” Oswald said. Curious, how easy it was to say now, the dam burst wide open, when it had been the hardest thing in the world before. “I want you more than anything. In every conceivable way, forever. I would think that much was obvious by now.” Ed stood frozen a few feet from the bed, just out of reach. “If I can’t have your love, I’ll settle for ruling a city with you. We were really good at it.”

“And if I never want _you_?” Ed added, quite unnecessarily, “I mean, in a sexually intimate way.”

“Then I’ll still be your best friend,” Oswald said—or would have said, if he’d had the slightest sense of self-preservation, if Ed hadn’t stripped from him everything he had, his empire and his reputation and his carefully constructed masks, every lie and illusion that had propelled a diminutive, impoverished immigrant’s son to become kingpin of the criminal underworld. He’d nothing to lose now save his life, and he would give that to Ed too, a thousand times over, slice open every vein in his body and spill the truth of himself at Ed’s feet. What actually came out was: “I’m pretty sure _you_ were the one kissing _me_ just now.”

“Oswald,” Ed growled, a warning. But he drew closer. For a few moments, he seemed to consider, in intricate detail, every part of his surroundings. Oswald watched him debate, jaw clenched, before he at last made up his mind and sat on the edge of the bed, his lean body a rigid line. 

This time, when Oswald laid his hand over Ed’s where it clenched into the fabric of his trousers, Ed didn’t pull away. “For such a brilliant man,” he said. “You can be so unbearably _stupid_ at times. I love you more than enough for the both of us.”

 

* * *

 

When winter hit its stride, ice crusted the Delaware Bay, and the mouth of the Gotham River was a shimmering ribbon that wove in and out of the grey sheets of fog that blanketed the city from view. It was a familiar sight by now. Oswald had never been so far from his home that he couldn’t look into the distance and know where it was, that no matter how broken in body or spirit, he could find his way back. 

They had stayed on the run during those first few days, moving from motel room to motel room on the meager remains of proceeds from a bank robbery Ed had committed during his initial nosedive into supervillainery. Now, the money dwindled to almost nothing, and with one of them a notorious criminal and the other officially missing and without access to his considerable bank account, Oswald hobbled outside to contemplate the city.

He was still feverish, and the cold on his face felt pleasantly numbing. Leaning on the drugstore cane Ed had picked up for him, he slid open the glass doors and eased himself into one of the plastic chairs on the balcony. The third floor of the motel overlooked the parking lot and the expressway, but the sheen of the frozen water glittered at the horizon, a trail that led home. 

Miles away, where the river hooked the city, Fish Mooney was assembling her army of freaks and monsters, the flaws in their DNA fortified by a deadly virus, two sins of science combined to cheat death and create a new breed of killer, swift and merciless. His enemies, if they hadn’t already started fighting amongst themselves, wouldn’t ever see her coming. And when the dust had settled from their fight for Gotham, Oswald would be ready to step in and restore order, just as before, with Ed at his side, but this time he’d get it right. They’d both get it right. He would make his mother proud.

He heard Ed push through the doors. He couldn’t stop himself from the reflexive flinch. He would bear Ed’s mark on him for the rest of his life, just as he felt Fish Mooney’s every time it rained. But a day would come, he knew, when he wouldn’t dread a sudden flash of green, just as perhaps a day would come when Ed would look at him and see not Isabella’s murderer, but his best friend and the person that he loved most in the world. Oswald was entirely confident of it.

Ed was humming to himself, the soft melody a silver wisp in the night air, and Oswald tilted his head back to rest against Ed’s sweater. What had started from the necessity of caring for him—whatever atrocities Oswald had committed, Edward Nygma the scientist had far too swollen an ego to allow a patient to die under his watch—had somehow evolved into a series of shy touches, a brush against his arm, a warm hand on his back. It wasn’t love; Oswald wasn’t so deluded as to expect miracles. Ed needed to know that he was real and not the vision that had followed him since that day on the dock, and Oswald, despite the danger, was compelled to reciprocate, each tentative, trembling hug an unspoken question: _Do you love me yet?_

He knew better than to ask aloud. He had tattered scraps of his pride, and a man can only have his heart broken so many times. Nonetheless, he felt Ed’s hands, still warm from the heat inside the motel room, fall to his shoulders.

“You were right,” Ed said, and Oswald's heart skipped a beat. Had he somehow given himself away? “It changed me. How many times can a person shed his skin before there’s nothing left underneath?”

“You’re still here, Ed.” 

“I don’t know what I’ll be. When we go back to Gotham.” 

“Are you frightened?”

Ed giggled, high and maniacal. “Quite the contrary, my friend. I’m utterly _thrilled._ ” Oswald’s breath caught on the word _friend._ It wasn’t everything. There would be time enough, amid the wreckage they’d leave and the reconstruction that would follow, for the rest of it. “Are you ready to go back?”

“Soon enough,” Oswald promised. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay here a little longer.”

Ed pressed his face into Oswald’s hair in something that might have been a kiss, and squeezed his shoulders, and together, they watched the sun rise like a splash of blood over the frozen river.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks. Thanks for reading and all the lovely comments and kudos. You have made me a very happy anon.
> 
> This is probably the closest I've gotten to writing songfic. If you're curious, the title and chapter titles are all from [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGcK6w_ewLo)


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